Git Best Practices

Branching model in Alice Lab

Main Branch

• Never code on main
• Always is release-ready (anyone can clone/download and it works)
• only merge develop into main when the team agrees (suggest always opening a github issue to resolve this)

Develop Branch

• Never code on develop
• Should always build & work
• feature branches fork from here (i.e. on branch 'develop' do:

git checkout -b nameOfNewBranch

then develop on that branch and merge only working changes into the develop branch

Feature Branches

• try to limit scope to smaller change(s) To create one:

# always create feature branch from the develop branch (never from main)
# so on branch 'develop'
git checkout -b nameOfNewBranch
# now set github.com to track this branch (so others can access it too)
git push -u origin nameOfNewBranch

Branching Workflow:

• Always make changes on a feature branch, only
• when ready to move changes to develop branch:

1. merge develop into feature

git merge develop feature

2. resolve any new conflicts, commit
3. switch to develop

git checkout develop

4. merge feature into develop

git merge feature develop